Create.js hackathon in Berlin

24 July 2012
in Berlin, Germany

3 minute read

Last week we at IKS organized a two-day hackathon for developers interested in Create.js, VIE, and in new tools for editing websites semantically.

The original agenda for the event can be found from the event’s wiki page, and I believe we got it covered quite well. I’ve been to quite a lot of hackfests, and usually the first day is mostly spent by people arriving, figuring out the WiFi setup, and getting to know the development tools. This time was different: people jumped straight into the code and started working.

More robust Hallo and Create

An important theme in the event was to improve both Hallo and Create. The Create.js theme got a lot nicer, and thanks to the contributions from Alkacon the next versions will run nicely also on older Internet Explorer and Opera versions.

Create’s editor selection mechanism was also rewritten. Now you can easily set up custom editor configurations for managing different content types. For instance:

VIE and literals

The VIE semantic interaction library is the basis of everything we’re doing in the decoupled CMS space.

Next big step for VIE is better literals handling, which will allow a lot easier management of multilingual content. Several people were working on this in the hackathon, and I hope we’ll be able to release the first beta of VIE 2.1 with this soon.

VIE provides a quite comprehensive entity type system, which most systems don’t really utilize yet. To make its capabilities more apparent, I built an integration with the Backbone Forms library where you can autogenerate quite nice forms on for any type that VIE knows about. For instance, we can generate forms for Schema.org types.

This will be the key feature for implementing a metadata editor in Create.js, and so it would be nice if CMSs would start providing their content type structure to VIE.

New CMS integrations

Several of the hackathon attendees came there to work on integrating Create.js with their CMSs. While the documentation is getting better, it is still good to be able to help developers implement the necessary steps into their systems.

An interesting new integration is with Drupal, worked on by Roni Kantis. While Drupal has their own Spark inline editing initiative, the Create.js module should show that cross-CMS collaboration in user interfaces is also possible. I hope to be able to demo this in DrupalCon Munich.

For PHP projects interested in Create.js, the CreatePHP library should make things a lot easier. In the hackathon its interfaces were clarified quite a bit, and now it powers the inline editing capabilities in both MidCOM and Symfony CMF, with TYPO3 coming soon.

There was also work done on integrations into popular frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. I hope we’ll hear more of these in the coming weeks.

More visibility for Create.js and Hallo

As more and more CMSs are embracing collaboration on the UI level, these projects are becoming quite popular. As I write this, Create.js has 1062 watchers on GitHub, and Hallo has 664.

While watchers don’t necessarily mean more contributions, it is certainly nice to see views like this:

WYSIWHAT

This week I also participated in the WYSIWHAT event, where Sourcefabric and OERPUB were discussing the approaches at rich-text editing of educational and large documents.

The event is still ongoing, but it seems there is a lot of synergy between what we’re doing with VIE and Create.js and their efforts. I’m certainly looking forward to collaborating with them in the future!

Continue reading

It is now 2013, and the IKS project, started back in 2009 to improve content management systems through semantic technologies, has ended. Alongside Apache Stanbol and VIE.js, the Create.js inline editing toolkit was one of the major outcomes of this European Union funded effort.

Our concept of Decoupled Content Management, together with the VIE and Create.js is really taking off. I’ve spent in various conferences this summer speaking about them.

Decoupled Content Management

Decoupled Content Management is a movement to bring clean separation of concerns into CMSs. With it, Content Management Systems can focus better on their core functionalities, and get the missing pieces through code-sharing and collaboration.

For me, the decoupled CMS story began in the OSCOM era of early 2000s, and culminated in the still-popular Decoupling Content Management article I wrote in 2011. The tools mentioned there — Create.js, VIE, and PHPCR — have since reached quite a nice level of adoption in mainstream CMSs.